Beauty, Mercy, Justice

Archive for June 22nd, 2015

Every now and then one reads a book that eloquently elaborates on something one only intuited, or had some half-formed notion about. Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America was one such book for me, Neil Postman’s Technopoly another. There have been others, through the years, but they tend to be rare things, received in gratitude.

I have read, and written, a lot over the years about the crisis of the American working class, which has steadily descended into poverty and hopelessness. And I have written about capitalism and its evils. And the labor movement and the illusion of ‘free’ market ideology and the concentration of wealth in America.

But nowhere have I seen these things addressed so clearly and cogently as in this book, every page of which has an ‘aha’ moment: